0.21

website-builder 0.21 — the publish check tells access problems from network ones 🔑

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own
words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🔑 A permission problem is no longer treated as a bad connection. When GitHub refuses
  a publish because of access — a changed security key, an expired login, or someone
  removing your permission — 0.20 could read it as a wobbly connection and quietly try
  again. It now says what it is, and stops, because trying again was never going to help.
• 🔌 Better handling of an upload that dies half-way. More of the ways a connection can
  fail mid-upload are now recognised, and told apart from problems that only look
  similar — a rejected upload that's actually too large, for instance, is no longer
  mistaken for a dropped one.
• 🧭 Every failure message now tells you where you stand, not just what went wrong —
  whether anything changed on your live site, and what's safe to run next. That's now a
  written rule for the toolkit, so it stays true as it grows.
• 🔁 Already have a site? Nothing changes on its own. Ask your assistant: "update my
  site's publish script to website-builder 0.21" — it swaps two files in and runs the
  built-in check, which tells you straight away if anything didn't land.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the
starter prompt from the README
into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #74.

0.20

website-builder 0.20 — publishing tells you what actually went wrong 🚦

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own
words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🚦 Publishing now tells you the truth when something goes wrong. Before, any hiccup
  while putting your site live reported the same alarming thing — that your live site and your
  draft had diverged — and warned you off the one thing that actually fixes it. A brief wifi
  drop said that. A failing test said that. Now each says what it is: a network blip you can
  just retry, tests you need to look at, or a genuine conflict worth asking for help with.
• 🔌 A dropped connection no longer guesses. If the upload dies half-way, nobody can
  honestly say whether it landed — so instead of pretending, it tells you to run it again,
  which is safe and settles the question.
• 🧭 Better advice when your computer and the cloud disagree. It now works out which side
  moved and tells you what to run, instead of always suggesting the one command that can't help.
• 🔁 Already have a site? Nothing changes on its own. Your site keeps the publishing script
  it was built with. To pick this up, just ask your assistant: "update my site's publish script
  to website-builder 0.20" — it swaps two files in and runs the built-in check, which tells you
  straight away if anything didn't land.
• 🧰 Small housekeeping: more hardening on the review tooling maintainers use, and internal
  project references cleaned out of the shared docs. Nothing here changes how you build a site.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the
starter prompt from the README
into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #69, PR #70, PR #71, PR #72, PR #73.

0.19

website-builder 0.19 — dependency security fixes + reviewer-tooling hardening 🔒

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own
words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🔒 Cleared 7 security advisories in the site starter's dependencies, including a couple
  in the image-processing library every site build uses. All routine patch-level updates
  already allowed by the existing setup — no changes needed on your end.
• 🧰 Small housekeeping: another round of hardening on the tooling maintainers use for
  outside code review, plus small cleanups elsewhere in the skill suite. Nothing here changes
  how you build a site.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the
starter prompt from the README
into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #60, PR #62, PR #63, PR #64, PR #65.

0.18

website-builder 0.18 — new sites now scaffold on Astro 7 🚀

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own
words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🚀 New sites start on Astro 7, the framework's current major version. Astro 7 changed a
  low-level detail of how it compresses page text — the kind of thing that could silently
  squish two words together if a sentence ever wraps around a link. We already turned on the
  setting that keeps the old, safe behavior, so every new site is protected from day one — one
  less thing to ever think about.
• 🩺 Already have a site? Your assistant can now spot when it's running an older version of
  Astro and walk you through updating it. There's a step-by-step upgrade checklist built for
  exactly this situation — no guesswork, no need to understand what Astro even is under the
  hood.
• 🔒 A clear way to report a security issue, if you (or a security researcher) ever spot
  one — see SECURITY.md in the download.
• 🧰 Small housekeeping: a round of hardening on the tooling maintainers use for outside
  code review, a packaging fix so an unrelated internal note could never accidentally ship in
  the download, and a couple of small dependency-install cleanups. Nothing here changes how
  you build a site.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the
starter prompt from the README
into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: this release went direct-to-main — abb6c0c (Astro 7 pin),
f8b80d9 (compressHTML:true), 18b05bf (upgrade guidance + staleness detection), 1f8b440
(entity-escape doc addition), 974ba26 + 2a29b94 (packaging/allowScripts fixes), 4a17855
(SECURITY.md), db6b5ab/ea08a1f/5f5e7ec/a59b97e/4c68960 (independent-review hardening),
763189b (CI fix).

0.17

website-builder 0.17 — you decide how much review your site gets 🎚️

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🎚️ Review depth is now your call. For most website changes the built-in two-pass review (free, runs immediately) is plenty. For the genuinely big stuff — a site-wide SEO repositioning, a checkout flow, a major redesign — your assistant can offer one outside AI reviewer as a second opinion. It now explains the options in plain language and asks you first, instead of defaulting to the heavyweight two-reviewer gate that's calibrated for application code.
• 🆓 No surprise credit use. The credit-consuming reviewer tier (Antigravity) is now strictly opt-in; the standard second-opinion reviewers (Codex CLI, ollama-cloud) are free — and your assistant says so, instead of warning about costs that don't apply.
• 🩹 The second-opinion offer is honest about setup. If the outside-reviewer kit isn't installed in your site, the assistant now checks first and frames it as "available after a one-time setup step" instead of promising something it can't run. There's also a documented fallback for AI assistants other than Claude Code.
• 🧰 Small extras: the Codex reviewer can be pointed at a specific model (CODEX_MODEL), its "all clear" detection recognizes more phrasings, and docs/ gained a visual process diagram plus a saved progress-tracker design mockup.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: this release went direct-to-main — 92fe407 (CODEX_MODEL override, PR #55), 2aaba61 (clean-verdict detection), ac55fe7 (Antigravity opt-in + plan-review defaults), e486061 (review depth = owner's choice), 9f89824/eac2961 (fixes from a Fable fresh-eyes review of website-review), dec5f06 (docs).

0.16

website-builder 0.16 — clearer SEO reports, easier second opinions 🔍

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🔍 Search Console reports now give you full, clickable links. Checking your site's search rankings used to hand back bare paths you'd have to reassemble by hand — especially annoying if you needed to paste a flagged page straight into Google's Removals tool. Now every URL in the report is complete and ready to use.
• 🤝 Getting a second opinion on bigger changes is easier to set up. If your AI assistant ever wants an independent cross-check before a non-trivial change ships, there's now a plain-language setup wizard that walks you through the free options — no assumption you already have anything installed.
• 🧰 A few small housekeeping fixes: an internal review skill now recognizes a couple more ways of asking for it by name, and there's new opt-in guidance (off by default) for anyone sharing a site's git checkout with collaborators or multiple AI assistants at once.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #49, PR #50, PR #51, PR #52, PR #53, and PR #54 (the last two are independent-review fixes for #52/#50, found and fixed via a 5-round Codex review this session).

v0.15 — German sites, now legally and technically complete

website-builder 0.15 — German sites, now legally and technically complete 🇩🇪

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• ⚖️ The Impressum is here. German law requires this page on essentially every commercial German site — v0.14 shipped the quality checks but forgot the page itself. Now there's a ready-to-fill draft (with the German privacy page it needed too), linked from every page like it has to be.
• 🖼️ Long German words no longer get cut off. Share-preview cards (the image that shows up when you paste your link into WhatsApp or Slack) could silently clip a long German word right off the edge. Fixed — and it now tells you loudly if a title genuinely can't fit, instead of shipping it broken.
• 🇩🇪 A German-only site is now a first-class citizen, not an afterthought. The most common shape — build the whole site in German, no English version — previously got zero protection against English content sneaking in under a German label. It does now. Same for du/Sie (informal/formal) mixing on one page.
• 🌍 Building a bilingual site? Partial translations (a German-only blog post on an English site, say) are now fully supported, with a lightweight option for sites that only need a couple of translated pages. Search engines get consistent signals either way — the exact kind of hreflang mistake that makes Google quietly drop your translated pages is now caught before you ship it.
• 🔍 German market SEO gets sharper, from title lengths (German words run wider) to Google/Bing search tracking that actually understands German spelling variants (München vs. muenchen) instead of reporting phantom zero traffic.
• 🧰 The toolkit itself got more honest — when the underlying skills improve, sites now find out about it (previously that update channel had a blind spot), and every claim the README makes about German support now has something real behind it.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

Already have a German site from v0.14? Ask your assistant to check for updates (make whats-new) — the Impressum and the other fixes are worth adding to an existing project too.

For the technically curious: this release closes out a full audit of the v0.14 German launch — 40 findings across 15 pull requests, every one independently reviewed. Start at PR #33 if you want to read through them.

0.14

website-builder 0.14 — real quality checks for German-language sites 🇩🇪

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🇩🇪 German websites now get the same quality bar English ones always had. Your AI assistant could already write German copy — but nothing was checking it was actually good. Now it is: German pages get real AI-slop/buzzword detection, a new check catches a "translation" that's secretly just a stub (or left in the wrong language under a translated nav/footer), and there's dedicated guidance for German SEO, search visibility, and finding your German-speaking audience.
• 📝 The README says it now too — a quick note (auf Deutsch!) that you can talk to your AI assistant entirely in German and still get first-class results.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #32.

0.13

website-builder 0.13 — your customizations stay protected 🔒

As always: your favorite AI assistant takes you by the hand — just ask it, in your own words, and it does the work.

What's new:

• 🔒 Your customizations are safe from now on. If you ever asked your AI assistant to tailor one of the bundled behind-the-scenes tools specifically for your site, that customization used to risk being silently overwritten the next time you pulled in the latest improvements. Now you can mark it "keep mine" (just ask your assistant), and refreshes will leave it alone — and tell you plainly that they did.
• 🧹 A few small behind-the-scenes fixes to keep things running smoothly.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #29, PR #30, and PR #31.

0.12

website-builder 0.12 — housekeeping, so your download stays clean 🧹

Nothing changes in how you build your website — as always, your favorite AI assistant guides you through every step, from idea to launch. This release is about keeping things tidy behind the scenes:

• 📦 A cleaner download. The zip you get below now contains only what your website actually needs — our internal working notes stay out, guaranteed by an automatic check on every future release.
• 🔒 Your local settings stay yours. Machine-specific configuration is now kept out of the shared code automatically.

New here? How to start: download website-builder.zip below, unzip it, and paste the starter prompt from the README into your AI assistant — it takes you by the hand from there.

For the technically curious: the details are in PR #27.